How to add a specific list of approvers

[#1]

Approval is a great feature of Jira Service Management, but sometimes it's not necessary to show to our customers the list of all users in our instance or we just need to show them a list of managers, for example.

Using the steps below you will be able to show customers just a short list of approvers on your Service project.

1 - Create a group in user management and add those who will be the approvers.
2 - Create a new custom field and set the type "User Picker (single user)".
3 - Add this new field to the necessary screen.
4 - Back to the custom fields' page, on the right side of the field you have just created, click on  > Contexts and default value.

5 - Click on Edit User Filtering.

6 - Check the box "Enable group or project role filtering", then on "Add filters" select "Group" and the group you created.
7 - Click on Add and then Save.

8 - Go to the project settings and click on Workflows.
9 - Select the workflow that has the status to add an approver and click on Configure.

10 - Then select the custom field you created on "Get approvers from", select the necessary transitions on "Transition when approved" and "Transition when declined" and Create.

11 - Publish the workflow.

Hope this helps!

If you have any feedback or question, please let us know.

[Kevin Barbar]

Hi Angélica, would allowing specific approvers this way require those users we put into the group in Step  to 1 to be licensed users? 

I'm working through this similar situation, we're trying to create a specific set of users for our Department Approvals. However, we didn't plan to fully license them as users. My first concern doing it this way is it seems like you can only add licensed users to a group (I could be wrong, still learning the software).

Second, when I followed the steps here and went to test with another user, within the ticket it shows that same user as the required approver. But, when I ask the user to approve, it doesn't sound like the request made it to the inbox.

Ultimately, what we're trying to accomplish is for our New Employee Requisition Forms we want our department heads to be the only users able to be selected within a drop down. From the drop down we want the selected user to receive an email that they have something in JSD needing approval without them requiring a license at all. Is this possible using out of the box JIRA tools, or Automation for Jira? I've seen articles for script runner, or power script, but we're trying to stay away from those for now.

Thank you!

[Angélica Luz]

Hi @Kevin Barbar,

Thank you for the question.
It's not necessary a license, but they need to be internal users since we can't add customers to groups.
When we create a user and we don't want them to count as a license, we can't add them to the default groups, so this group for approver can't be a default one.

But, when I ask the user to approve, it doesn't sound like the request made it to the inbox.
Approvers receive customer notifications, so if you create a ticket using the + button in Jira and not the customer portal, the request type will be empty and customer notifications won't be generated. So, when you test, make sure to use the customer portal for the notifications to work.

Regards,
Angélica

[Alonso Quinonez]

Hi Angelica, how do approvers receive notification that they need to approve a request?

Also, how do we set assign specific approvers for each customer? i.e. employee and manager

[Angélica Luz]

Hi @Alonso Quinonez, 

They will receive a customer notification just informing that a request is awaiting approval and they need to go to the portal to do that.

They will only receive a notification if the ticket is created through the portal.

Related to restrict the list depending on each customer, currently, there is no workaround for that. You can use this tutorial to add specific managers and then the customer will select on the portal, but it's not possible, for example, to restrict the results depending on the domain. 

Regards,
Angélica

[Alexander Dinchev]

Hi @Angélica Luz 

I've stumbled upon this conversation in regards to a situation I'm facing.

What I need however is somewhat different. I need to make several users from the list to approve the request.

I can't find any workaround. I don't see the filtering set for multi-user picker field.

Is that possible?

[Angélica Luz]

Hi @Alexander Dinchev

Welcome to Community!

To have a list of specific approvers it's necessary to use the "Single user" custom field due to the option to select a group. The "Multiple users" don't have this option, so I'm afraid that there is no workaround for that at the moment.

Regards,
Angélica

[Alexander Dinchev]

Hi @Angélica Luz ,

Thank you for the fast response. This is quite inconvenient, as at the moment the only approvals can be either single choosable, multiple fixed or the reporter has to browse throughout the entire organization, when he wants to choose an approval.

Please consider this as an option in further development.

Regards,

Alex D.

[Maltavius]

Why create all this data once again, I already have my Active Directory (or LDAP) with the specific data.

All users are in Active Directory and is populated with the Manager role (their boss).
All Users are in a Department in Active Directory, this is their group.

For a Service Request a Manager should always approve. Why do I need an external plugin for this fairly basic functionality in the approval process?

In a competing product (that we are currently using) we can assign $CFO, $CEO, $Department_Approver, $Department_Head, $Reporting_To (AD Manager field) to the approver field in our templates and provided our AD contains the information, the Approver is automatically selected.

Since HR controls the data, when someone switches department or gets a new boss in a couple of hours the AD-sync has made sure that the ITSM system has the correct data.

Manually handing groups in Jira seems like a backwards way of doing it.

[Dean Mullarkey]

Nice!

[Bin]

Nice

[Stanislav]

@Angélica Luz 

The case is in service desk:
if one of the approvers aprove the ticket and then understand that he need to cencel his approval and then re-aprove it later. Is it possible to get your approval back ?

Or even if it is one approver.

[Stanislav]

Find the answer:

You can add a transition back to the status from which the transition was made. Name it "cancel Approvals" and add a post-function with a scriptrunner where the Approval will be removed.

And for multiple approvers you can make a cyclic transition from this status to it self, call it "cancellation of approval" and define the current user in the script runner, and then remove its Approval.

[rbalamu2]

Hi Team,
Can this approach be used for Jira software cloud in company managed project. Can someone guide me on this? 

Thanks,

Rahini

[Elaine McMillan]

@Angélica Luz  can this process by used for multiselct or does it have to be a type "User Picker (single user)"?

[Angélica Luz]

Hi @Elaine McMillan,

This workaround only works when using User Picker (single user) custom fields.

Regards,
Angélica

[Ben Gallant]

Hi @Angélica Luz I'm working on an automation that sends an email to a manager's personal assistant every time that manager is added as an approver. I'm using JSM Team Managed, Cloud. 

I've chosen the right trigger (I think), 

But I'm having a hard time finding a way to filter for a particular manager's name. The approver field in the Team-Managed JSM is called "Approver ADV" but it's not showing up as one of the options to choose from when I use this: 

Since the approval field was created in the project (and it's not company-managed so it's not a global custom field) is there a better way to approach this? 

Thanks for any help you can provide on this.